“Sam Hawley,” Mary Titus yelled, “you’re crazier than me!” Then she fell into another round of hysterics.
For a minute there was nothing but silence on the other side of the door. Then Loo’s father tried the knob. When that did not work he broke the lock with a single kick. He stepped inside. There was Mary Titus in the bathtub, rolling back and forth in a pool of blood, and Loo holding her own palm, imprinted with the widow’s teeth.
It was a small bathroom, and with the addition of Hawley the last of the air leaked out. Loo watched her father and waited. He was the person she knew most in this world. She had seen him disappointed and angry enough to throw someone off a pier, but she had never seen his face harden in the way it did when the widow pointed at the photos of his wife and laughed.
Hawley’s shoulders filled the entryway. He smelled of fish guts and brine, his hands red and rough from handling knives and opening oysters, and he used them to scoop Mary Titus up in his arms. In two giant steps he had tossed her out onto the porch as if she were a dog and shut the door on her. Then he was back in the bathroom with Loo.
“Are you hurt?” he asked.
“No,” said Loo but again she was lying.
“Show me,” he said, and Loo turned her palm over. Hawley ran his fingers across the bite. He closed the lid of the toilet and set Loo down on top. Then he turned his back and opened the cabinet under the sink and pulled out their medical kit: a bright orange toolbox with a red cross on the lid. The orange box had saved Hawley’s life once in Alaska, and after Loo was born it had traveled with them across the country, stocked with gauze and bandages, flashlights, bottled water, freeze-dried meals, tablets of iodine, knives, duct tape, plastic tarps, matches and a crank-powered radio. Whenever one of them was hurt, the answer to fixing them was always inside.
In one quick sweep, Hawley gathered her mother’s toothbrush and perfume and the crimson lipstick and put them in a drawer. In the space made he set down the toolbox, opened the latches and took out a bottle of witch hazel and some cotton balls. When he turned around his face was calmer. He sat on the edge of the tub, doused the cotton and pressed it where Loo’s skin was broken and swollen. They could both hear Mary Titus, who was no longer laughing. She was screaming and pounding her fists on their front door.
“Did you hit her?” her father asked.
“No,” Loo said.
“Too bad.”
Loo’s hand began to sting. She tried not to listen to the muffled thumps of the widow, and kept her eyes focused on the orange toolbox. Like the photographs of her mother, and the scars on his skin, this box had come into her father’s life long before she ever did. For what felt like the thousandth time, she read the words hand-painted across the front: THESE THINGS WE DO THAT OTHERS MAY LIVE.
“I’m a terrible person,” she said, and she gestured with the hand Hawley was not holding, at the bathtub splashed with red, at her mother’s torn receipt on the floor, at her own drunken state. Now that her father was here she did not know why she had opened the bathroom door, why she’d ever let a stranger inside their world.
Hawley pressed the towel against her palm until it hurt. He shook his head. “You don’t know what terrible is.”
Mary Titus was shouting now, loud enough for the neighbors to hear, saying his name over and over. Sam Hawley Sam Hawley Sam Hawley Sam Hawley—open the door! Open the fucking door! I’m going to die out here and it’ll be all your fault, Sam Hawley!
Loo’s father got a roll of bandages from under the sink and started to wrap Loo’s hand like a mummy’s. He peeled off some surgical tape and pressed down the corners, until the hurt was sealed.
Outside, Mary Titus continued to scream.
“Everyone’s going to hate us again.” Loo watched as her father pulled another towel from the rack and rinsed it with cold water. He twisted it tight as a rope between his hands. Then he started to wash her face, and it was only then that she realized she had been crying.
“Let them,” he said.
Bullet Number Two
HAWLEY HADN’T BEEN IN THE desert since his mother died. That was four years ago, when he was just twenty-one. The hospital had tracked him down with the news, and he’d taken the bus, all the way from Cheyenne to Phoenix. The police made him identify her body in the morgue. The place was dank and cold compared to the heat outside and smelled of chemicals and bleach. He stood underneath the fluorescent lights and they rolled his mother out of a drawer in the wall.
She’d been dead for more than two weeks, and her body was absolutely still, like an animal run over on the side of the road. Her face had sunken in and most of her teeth were gone, but she still had that square chin and those long, delicate fingers, the ones he remembered running through his hair in the dark when he was a kid. He buried her alone in a cemetery near the hospital. Then he’d taken the bus back to Cheyenne.
Hawley had wheels of his own now, an old Ford Flareside. He’d bought it on his twenty-fifth birthday with cash and he enjoyed opening up the engine on the highway, the windows rolled down and the blazing heat channeling in, the sand blowing through his hair and the red cliffs layering hues in the distance. Behind his seat was a twenty-gauge Remington shotgun, a nine-millimeter Beretta revolver, a SIG Sauer pistol, a crossbow tire iron, his father’s rifle from the war and seven thousand dollars.
He’d gotten a postcard from Jove, who was working outside Flagstaff at an Indian casino. Jove still had dreams of buying a boat and sailing it down the Hudson, but he also had a bad habit of burning through his money fast. Now he had an angle for ripping off the casino, and he’d asked Hawley if he wanted in.
It was night by the time Hawley crossed over into Arizona. He took Route 191 to 160 and after an hour or more he was the only car for miles. When he looked in the rearview it was nothing but blackness and when he looked out the windshield it was nothing but blackness and all he saw was to the end of his own headlights beaming into the dark. An hour later he was in the middle of a dust storm, tumbleweed flashing past, sometimes hitting the grate and getting caught under the body of the truck. The wind swept down in gusts, shimmying his Ford off the road. It was late and his eyes were already bleary and now he had to struggle with the wheel to keep his tires straight.
After a long while of this he saw a light ahead, a motel standing all by itself at the crossroads. He pulled into the parking lot and got a room. The guy at the desk was a Navajo Indian. He was wearing a red bowling shirt with a white collar and a pair of pins embroidered over the heart. Behind the desk was a back room and Hawley saw another Navajo and a freckled guy at a table playing cards. They looked like they’d been going all night, empty bottles of beer lined up on the floor and ashtrays full.
“You’re big blind,” the man with the freckles called out.